WordPress 5.2 is Released

Version 5.2 of WordPress has rolled out with security and general feature improvements, as announced by Matt Mullenweg on official WordPress News blog. The latest release code name Jaco, is named after Jaco Pastorius, a renowned jazz bassist.

In the latest WordPress 5.2 release, feature enhancements, as well as new features are offered to both, its power users and the developer community. WordPress has updated its Site Health feature, by introducing two new pages for debugging common configuration issues. It also provided space for developers to include debugging information of website for site maintainers.

WordPress PHP Error Protection is an administrator-focused feature which displays annoying PHP errors in a less scary way. Moreover, WordPress will enter recovery mode upon encountering “White Space of Death” error by stopping the activation of error-prone theme and plugins.

General Feature Improvements

WordPress has brought Accessibility Updates to help improve the user experience of the folks using screen reader apps and other assistive technologies.

Moreover, thirteen new Dashboard Icons in the latest release has been introduced which you can find in the admin dashboard right away.

Finally, WordPress has been bestowed with the power to check for plugins compatibility with PHP version before activating any plugin on the site. So, if the plugin is using the version which your site doesn’t support. In that case, WordPress won’t activate that plugin. Now, how cool is that right?!

Developer Centric Features

WordPress also offers something really cool for its developers. One cheerful update is the PHP version bump for WordPress. As per the latest release, the minimum supported PHP version is 5.6.20.

What it means to you as a developer is that you don’t have to feel left alone anymore. As you can use modern PHP features including anonymous functions, namespaces and more, same like all the other geeky folks who have been using these features for a quite some time now.

The new release has also made easier for you to publish your Privacy Policy. As WordPress has introduced a new theme page template, two styling classes, and conditional functions.

Furthermore, a new wp_body_open hook has been introduced. The hook let’s theme options inject custom code at the beginning of the <body> tag.

Let’s Talk JavaScript!

JavaScript is the future of the web. WordPress has realized that and has integrated React library for its frontend in one of the previous releases. Now, in new WordPress release, the latest JavaScript automation and build tools like Webpack and Babel have already been integrated for the developers. Now the dev ninjas can be more focused on building cool stuff than worrying about the tedious build process.

That’s all there is to it for now peeps. We hope you will find this post a useful resource for yourself. If you like this guide, don’t forget to share your feedback, subscribe and spread the word. In fact, we will greatly appreciate it by saying… Thank you!